Hi! What is it about the “Every day it's a gettin’ closer” song? It is said that it was suggested by Terry in 1991. It constantly pops up in the script (and it is there in the so-called “shitscript” of the movie of which everybody seem so upset about). It sounds like perfectly straightforward and lighthearted love song. Is there something more sinister about it what I don’t get?
Hello, yes, it’s the song Everyday by Buddy Holly :).
I think that the ‘sinister’ element about it is, that yes it is a very funky tune, but in the same time the lyrics are ‘Everyday, it’s a gettin’ closer’ meaning that the things - one of which in Good Omens context is Armageddon - are coming, and getting closer :).
And yes, it was suppossed to be the Good Omens theme :):
Neil talks about it in the Introduction to the Script Book: “In the scripts, Buddy Holly’s song ‘Every Day’ runs through the whole like a thread. It was something that Terry had suggested in 1991, and it was there in the edit. Our composer, David Arnold, created several different versions of ‘Every Day’ to run over the end credits. And then he sent us his Good Omens theme, and it was the Good Omens theme. Then Peter Anderson made the most remarkable animated opening credits to the Good Omens theme, and we realised that ‘Every Day’ didn’t really make any sense any longer, and, reluctantly, let it go. It’s here, though. You can hum it.”
Or David G. Arnold in this article: In the early ‘90s, Terry Pratchett, who co-authored the book the show is based on with Neil Gaiman, suggested that “Everyday” would be a great song for any possible adaptation. It would be a song that could recur throughout the whole story, opening the show and also running over the end credits in different incarnations, reflecting where they were in the story.
And so Arnold’s first task was to create six different versions, none of which survived to the series, although the idea lives on in the TV spots. “There was a death metal version, a Shakespearean sonnet-y version, a Langley Schools Music Project kids’ choir version, a Carmina Burana version,” Arnold said. “So they do exist, and they’re quite funny. The death metal one is hilarious, because it’s the sweetest song in the world and fitting that into a head-banging version was quite the challenge. Here, I’ll give you a blast,” he said, as cacophonous music played. The trick, it seemed, was abandoning the melody and using a growling vocal style. “It’s a cute idea.”
As cute as it was, Arnold had another idea: Create an original theme and sustain it the way the Buddy Holly song would have, adapting it to the end of each episode. End the first episode “the way Queen would have done it,” end the second episode with “an angry formal string quartet,” end another with a “maniacal church organ,” another “like a fairground carousel,” and so on, to feel “like a nice scent that lingers.”
Or in this article: So actually, the first thing I did was record those versions. At the end of the first few weeks, while they were still shooting, I had these six different version of “Everyday,” each of them completely different to the other. Maybe that sowed the seeds of where we were going to go, but I did ask them if they would contemplate listening to an idea that I had for a theme tune, for the reason I said before. I love a theme tune, and I think it’s a sort of backbone of the entire piece.
So, I wrote the theme, they came up to my room, and I had that horrible moment when you have to play it for them and hope they don’t hate it. Neil just turned around and said, “Well, that’s Good Omens,”
